Indie Dev Talks PlayStation Versus Xbox Development

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Brian Provinciano talks about which company is easiest to work with.

By Colin Moriarty

When Brian Provinciano concocted his home-grown game Retro City Rampage and started putting it out on various platforms, he caught a glimpse into what it’s like to work with three gigantic gaming companies: Sony, Microsoft and Steam. In a conversation with IGN – facilitated by Sony in anticipation of a couple of talks he’s giving at GDC concerning PlayStation Vita development – he spoke about what it was like dealing with each corporation.

Not surprisingly, Provinciano seems to fall on the side of Sony, mostly due to what seems to be the unexpected ease of bringing his game to Vita and PS3, not to mention that it did well for him on those platforms.

“Everyone I talk to, hands down, says that the Vita is the best system to play [Retro City Rampage] on,” he said. “It’s a good gameplay experience for the Vita, because I really was tired of GTA IV’s way of driving forever and ever. I want to focus on smaller, shorter missions, and that ended up fitting the handheld platform very well. But as a developer, someone who’s done development on every platform under the sun, the Vita SDK (Software Development Kit)... were just super well-put-together and easy to use.”

“Deployment on the Vita dev kit was as fast as PC,” he continued. “That’s something that I’ve never seen before in a dev kit. That in itself made it such a pleasant experience.”

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Deployment on the Vita dev kit was as fast as PC.

Working with PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita was also apparently quite easy for Provinciano; he was able to bring the game between the two systems, complete with cross-save and cross-buy, fairly seamlessly. “If you were to do your game on, say, Wii U and 3DS, you’d be doing everything twice. They’re completely different systems. With Vita and PS3, there’s a lot of similarities.”

“My plan wasn’t actually do to handhelds originally,” he admitted. “It was just to do consoles and PC. But when it was so easy to develop on the Vita, well, why the heck not?”

Unfortunately, Provinciano’s experience with Microsoft wasn’t nearly as good. While he explains the “promotion” he got from PlayStation for Retro City Rampage as “incredible,” things were different for him when bringing the game to Xbox 360.

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If you were to do your game on, say, Wii U and 3DS, you’d be doing everything twice.

“With Microsoft especially, it’s like I’m dealing with a corporation when I’m dealing with them. It’s hard to plan things. You have very little control. Like with the release date, for example, on PlayStation. You can work with them and they’ll give you feedback and say, ‘Hey, this week is pretty busy. You might want to do it another week.’ Or if you prefer, you can just say, ‘I want the game out this week,’ and they’ll say, ‘okay.’ They’ll put it out and try to promote it as well as they can.”

“On Xbox,” he continued, “I’m not sure if you know about the slot setup, but pretty much, your game gets out there when they say it can. You have very little control. You’re just lucky to get whatever slot you get. That one reason alone is a big factor as to why I’ve been able to have so much success on PlayStation and less on Xbox.”

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With Microsoft especially, it’s like I’m dealing with a corporation when I’m dealing with them.

Provinciano further illuminated his situation by talking about his excellent experience with Steam. “It was over a year of work and I don’t know how many man-months just to deal with the Xbox side of the business things and all that other stuff,” he said. “Whereas Steam was just three days, and then Steam is 100 percent feature-identical to the Xbox version.”

“One of the reasons why I’m on this call, too,” he later concluded, “is just that some consoles are better to work with than others. The ones that are better to work with, like Sony, I want to honor them and give them the recognition they deserve. It’s nice just to show people what the whole picture is, because a lot of people don’t necessarily know. [A developer] might be a fan of one console, like Xbox, and they want to get [their] game on there, and they don’t realize what’s in store there.”

If you’re attending GDC in San Francisco, spanning from March 25 through March 29th, you can catch Brian Provinciano at two separate panels: “PlayStation Vita Development: From Start-to-Finish and Why You Should Be Excited About It” and “One Man, 17 SKUs: Shipping On Every Platform At Once.”

Colin Moriarty is an IGN PlayStation editor. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN and learn just how sad the life of a New York Islanders and New York Jets fan can be.